I'm in the process of buying my third film scanner. I'm at the moment using an 18 month old Minolta Scan Dual, which has done quite well for me and I've been contemplating buying the new Minolta Scan Elite. It appears to have impressive specs and the software promises to do marvels. But has anyone tried it hands on? If so, can you share your thoughts about the scanner and your results?

-- Gretar Ivarsson (gretar.ivarsson@or.is), March 24, 2000

Answers

I have it on the authority of a Minolta rep. that the Scan Elite is exactly the same as the Scan Speed, simply with the addition of more sophisticated software. They also hinted that there was an entirely re-designed scanner on the way, with much better colour matching ability.

It seems to me that the Scan Elite is a "stop-gap" product, aimed at keeping market interest alive while the real new scanner/s is/are in preparation.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 24, 2000.

Thanks for the input Pete. If you hear anything more on this "next generation" scanner, like resolution, dynamic range and bit depth, don't hesitate to pass it along. As for your comments, the Elite and Speed do appear to be more or less identical. I wonder it the new Elite software will work on the less expensive Scan Speed?

-- Gretar Ivarsson (gretar.ivarsson@or.is), March 24, 2000.

Actually the one difference between the Elite and the Speed is the employment of Digital ICE technology from Applied Science Fiction. The hardware actually uses a fourth channel (in addition to RGB) to scan for surface defects, then the software uses an algorithm (similiar to background subtraction and averaging) to render the cleaned up image. Its actually the one thing that I wish they would have introduced with the Scan Speed, but you can't have everything.

-Jason

-- Jason Kirk (jasonkirkphoto@hotmail.com), March 24, 2000.

One other difference between the elite software and the scan speed software is that the elite supports multi pass scanning for increased shadow detail. You can get this with the scan speed if you use a third party scanner driver and it makes a fair difference in the output

-- Jonathan Ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), March 24, 2000.